N30 Strike - Unite against the cuts - Solidarity is Strength

Text of a WSM leaflet distributed today in Northern Ireland for the public sector strike.

N30 Strike - Unite against the cuts - Solidarity is Strength

Today’s industrial action builds on the momentum from the education and healthcare strike last month and sends out the message that we mean business. Congratulations to all who have taken part and especially to those who have over the past few weeks and months built for today’s action.

We are relied on every day to run the hospitals, schools, fire service, and all other public services that society depends on to function. Today we have demonstrated that when we withdraw our labour and stand together in defence of our rights we have real strength.

However a one day strike on its own will only express our anger and let off a bit of steam. It is not enough if we want to actually defeat the ongoing attacks on our pay and conditions - attacks which are affecting all workers and unemployed.

Solidarity and support for strike action needs to built across all workplaces unionised or not and in our communities where we are feeling the impact of these devastating cuts on our standard of living if we want to win. In the short-term we need to be organising for rolling strike action including go-slows and ultimately an indefinite general strike. Such action is needed because history shows us that those at the top will concede little of significance without such mass resistance.

We need to build a mass militant campaign which is opposed to all cuts and attacks on services, controlled by rank and file workers and independent of all opportunist political parties who are only interested in elections . A victory on the pensions for public sector workers builds towards the fight needed to win a victory for all workers.

Lobbying politicians and marching from A-B has limited returns and can even add to the pervading sense of powerlessness. Politicians, like our trade union leadership, cannot be trusted and will work to police and sabotage any affective action. Taking back control of OUR unions from below is part and parcel of the fight to defend what we have won over the years.

Stormont offers us no alternative and is part of the problem. Despite their rhetoric and intention to not cross any picket lines, all our local political parties are committed to implementing these vicious anti-working class cuts and the wider neo-liberal agenda of slashing and privatising public services by making us pay for the greed and crimes of the 1%.

In the end capitalism and the state is the problem and we are the solution. As we unite we can become a force that capitalism cannot control, cannot crush. We can create a whole new society that serves the needs of all of us, not a minority.

This leaflet is produced by the Workers Solidarity Movement, a class struggle anarchist organisation in Ireland who are involved in our trade unions and community organisations. We see our role as helping to organise a fightback and discussing how we can begin to build a new society.

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Our solidarity today (11/02) to the LUAS workers striking for decent pay rates. The crisis was used by the government and capitalist class to drive down wages and ensure that a bigger share of profits went to shareholders. The LUAS fight is a fight for all of us as a victory should be a green light to all workers to demand pay rises, including the recovery of the money lost in the cuts imposed under the crisis. Across the world the share of income that goes to the richest 1% has soared while that going tooth rest of us has been slashed, we need to fight to reverse this.

Friday June 12ths shock closure of the iconic Clery’s department store in Dublin shows how the law is set up to favour capital and screw workers. Workers are being told there may be no additional redundancy or owed holiday payments as the company is in debt. But this is only the case because right before the closure the largest asset, the building itself, was separated off from the accumulated debts. This was almost certainly legal under our system but of such obvious dubious morality that the workers could expect massive popular support if they occupied the building on a permanent ongoing basis.

Around 50 people attended a lunch time vigil today organised by the Belfast Trade and District Council. A range of political organisations and unions attended including the Independent Workers Union, the WSM and Organise! During the rally one speaker from the council also referred to the police being workers too. This will provide little comfort to working people on the receiving end of state violence and terror. As our comrades from the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front note, ‘The role of the police is to repress and silence the working class and poor. This problem cannot be fixed by commissions or enquiries – as some people think. Ask the family of Andries Tatane. It cannot be changed by elections. Remember: Sharpeville 1960, Soweto 1976, Uitenhague 1985, Michael Makhabane in 2000, SAMWU workers in 2009, Andries Tatane in 2011 … Marikana 2012. At least 25 protestors and strikers were killed from 2000, before Marikana.’

With the announcement today by the TEEU and Unite that they are urging a No vote in the forthcoming Fiscal Compact Referendum allied to the fact that Mandate announced a similar position yesterday a clear division is emerging between the leading trade unions. SIPTU has basically offer its support for the treaty in return for a funded job creation plan, this is basically the union leadership buying time before it falls in line with Labour and calls for a yes vote.

WSM members & supporters in northern Ireland will be providing live coverage of the N30 Pension strikes today via our Twitter feed. The strike is part of the UK wide public sector strike against attacks on public sector pensions, attacks similar to those imposed on public sector workers in southern Ireland over the last couple of years. They are part of a Europe wide offensive against the pensions rights of workers.

In what is clearly a concerted effort to smash their union organisation, over 170 Aer Lingus cabin crew have been ‘removed from the payroll’ by management in a dispute about rostering arrangements in the Irish airline.

Since the middle of January civil and public servants have engaged in a work-to-rule in an attempt to force a reversal of the pay cuts announced by the government in the December budget. Across the country workers in government offices, colleges, schools, hospitals etc. are taking action, which they hope will result in a change of government policy.

Members of WSM and Organise gathered on a bright afternoon light of a cold Janaury day, in the leafy surburbs of Booterstown, Dublin, outside the German Embassy to protest recent Berlin District Court Decision to stop the Free Workers Union (FAU - Freie Arbeiterinnen- und Arbeiter-Union) from being able to call itself a Union.

We have to ask ourselves how we have found ourselves in unions where the leadership was allowed take such an approach. And we have to work out how we create unions that we control and which will help us organise together to defend our common interests. How has it come to this?

The government says if we Vote no to Croke Park they will impose it anyway. Many of the union leadership try and scare us into voting Yes with this threat and by saying the only alternative is strike action. Both are right. If we just vote no than the government will attack us. And when they do the only way we can win is if we are willing to fight back - that will mean industrial action. It will almost certainly mean at least the credible threat of an indefinite strike.

Irish trade union leadership have agreed an austerity programme for public sector workers. WSM is arguing against this deal. This article gives some of the details and our arguments against this attack on workers. [Italiano] [Français]

Many trade union activists have known for years that “social partnership” comes at a huge price for union independence and the ability of trade unions to defend the interest of their members. The myth that government and employers on one side and workers on the other side have some form of common interest has been peddled for over twenty years. This has resulted in a trade union movement whose leadership seems incapable of independent thought and whose membership has been browbeaten into accepting pay cuts, ‘pension levies’ and various attacks on our working conditions and living standards over the past couple of years.

Our solidarity today (11/02) to the LUAS workers striking for decent pay rates. The crisis was used by the government and capitalist class to drive down wages and ensure that a bigger share of profits went to shareholders. The LUAS fight is a fight for all of us as a victory should be a green light to all workers to demand pay rises, including the recovery of the money lost in the cuts imposed under the crisis. Across the world the share of income that goes to the richest 1% has soared while that going tooth rest of us has been slashed, we need to fight to reverse this.

Anarchist organisation Workers Solidarity Movement has congratulated public sector workers who took part in today’s 24-hour work stoppage and called for further stoppages “in order to force a change of direction from the government”.

The IWW is fighting a major campaign against the centralisation and cuts within England's National Blood service. This release relates the latest phase of the wobbly campaign, which aims to reverse the plans.